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Thursday, 13 December 2012

Mick Jagger love letters to Marsha Hunt make £187,000 at auction

A collection of love letters written by Mick Jagger to
American singer Marsha Hunt has sold at auction for £187,250.

The
"beautifully-written and lyrical" letters were penned in the summer
of 1969 while the Rolling Stones frontman was in Australia.

They are
believed to be the inspiration for the band's hit single Brown Sugar.

According to
Sotheby's the 10 letters had been expected to fetch up to £100,000.

Hunt confessed
she was selling them because she needed the money.

"I put
these letters in a bank 30 years ago thinking that our daughter would find them
valuable as an adult," she told the BBC.

"Who could
have anticipated that rock 'n roll would remain so popular, that 30 years on
this band would still be performing?"

The letters
were written to Hunt, the then face of the West End production of Hair, in July
and August 1969 while Jagger was filming Ned Kelly in the Australian outback.

At the time,
his relationship with Marianne Faithfull was under strain - she was due to play
the lead role in the film but attempted suicide in Australia and went back to
England.

"The
passage of time has given these letters a place in our cultural history,"
Hunt said after the sale.

"1969 saw
the ebbing of a crucial, revolutionary era, highly influenced by such artists
as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, James Brown and Bob Dylan.

"Their
inner thoughts should not be the property of only their families, but the
public at large, to reveal who these influential artists were - not as
commercial images, but their private selves," she said.

Jagger's
relationship with Hunt, with whom he had his first child, Karis, was kept under
wraps until 1972.

She told the BBC that the term 'love letters' was
"possibly the wrong thing to call them".

"There's nothing salacious in them. This is
somebody reflecting what is going on in his life at a particular time when,
because of his age - he was actually 25 when he went off to Australia - you're
really looking at somebody in their artistic prime, talking about filming,
talking about music, talking about the future, and they are reflective.

"There has been a growing 50-year history of
this person as a writer and as an influence upon young people," she said.

"It would have been criminal for these letters
not to become public. One has to look at the fact that somebody has become
historically important."

Hunt told the Guardian
newspaper that she was selling the letters because she had been unable
to pay her bills.

"I'm broke," Hunt, who now lives in France,
told the newspaper.

The letters were the centrepiece of an English
literature and history sale at Sotheby's which also also included song lyrics
and a Rolling Stones playlist.